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OpenStack Upstream Training in Atlanta A Big Success

The first edition of OpenStack Upstream Training completed today in Atlanta: the class made of software developers from around the world, started learning technical and social convention of one of the largest open source collaboration project. During the first day, twenty people picked a real bug or feature to work on, got their development environment setup, signed the CLAs and made the first attempts at committing and reviewing patches. After getting the ‘hard’ technical skills sharpened, the second day of training was all about learning the ‘soft’, social skills necessary to collaborate with a massive amount of people across the continents.

If you saw pictures of legos on twitter tagged #openstack, you have seen images of the OpenStack City role playing game. The students were split in three groups and starts with a city partially built, with a rough master plan for expansion. One group of students acts as the rulers of the city, another group acts as new contributor and the third group acts as the Product Manager of the new contributors. The role game is a nice way to practice the suggestions of the morning. on how to communicate intentions, execute on ideas, interact with other people working on OpenStack components.

With many years of practise contributing to many free software projects, Loic Dachary kindly donated his time to the OpenStack Foundation to lead the training, adapting the content of Upstream University to the specific needs of OpenStack. The class gives strong emphasis on the soft skills necessary to speed up acceptance of contributions. We noticed that over the years, a lot of new contributors, especially occasional ones, don’t have enough exposure to the big picture of OpenStack and these are more likely to be frustrated by the complex set of tools, processes, people between a bug fixed on a local branch and code accepted upstream. Based on the feedback gathered, this first set of graduates from OpenStack Upstream Training will surely get a pleasant experience. Hopefully they’ll keep growing inside OpenStack community and help future first time contributors.